roasted vegetables with an egg on top

We were dying for vegetables after our odd weekend in the Tri-Cities, so we loaded up a shopping cart with mushrooms, onion, fennel, beets, carrot and a parsnip and took it all home to roast with olive oil and salt. I separated out the shrooms and fennel to roast together, parboiled the beets and put them in a pan with the carrot, and put the onion and parsnip in a third pan (J is not a big fan of the parsnip). When everything was caramelized and soft I tossed it all together on our plates, and topped the piles with a lovely halibut steak that I had roasted as well. It was all very fresh tasting and delicious, and made us feel that it was nice to be home (sleeping in our own bed helped, too).

So dinner was nice, but I felt the high point was lunch the next day. I was feeling inspired after seeing this post and video on poaching eggs, as well as months of reading the wonderful blog posts on Last Night’s Dinner featuring beautiful poached eggs on top of duck hash or other yummy things. I had been known to poach an egg occasionally, but usually wimped out and ended up frying them (I’m good at frying eggs, at least) and eating them for breakfast on top of leftover greens or couscous.

But I did it! It’s not as pretty as it could be, but it was perfectly done and it tasted wonderful with the roasted parsnip and beets and such, with the yolk dribbling down and mixing with the sweet vegetables juices. With a good sprinkle of fleur de sel, it was a cheery and restorative lunch.

Pork braised in milk

Our plan for Sunday - which actually worked out, astonishingly enough - was to go get our Christmas tree at a local farm, set it up, and braise something for dinner so it could be cooking away and scenting the house while we decorated our tree. Often, of course, these plans don’t work out, because getting the tree into the house takes approximately five times longer than you think it will, and by the time it’s upright, the floor is vacuumed and the furniture has all been rearranged twice, you don’t have time for an involved dinner. But we actually allowed enough time for once, so we had our braise and our tree, too.

I was very pleased with the braised short ribs I made out of Molly Stevens’ book All About Braising, and wanted to try another recipe or two from her. We have an Italian friend who used to make pork cooked with milk and sage, but I had never tried it myself (I think I still wasn’t convinced it really worked) so when I saw a recipe for Pork Loin Braised in Milk, I thought I’d try it just as written and see what happened.

Salmon with beets & fennel

Saturday night’s dinner was pretty exciting (and filling), so I made us a “recovery” dinner for Sunday, just a fillet of wild-caught sockeye salmon, pan-seared in olive oil, and a head of fennel and some beets, cut up and roasted in the oven. It was beautiful, fresh tasting and sweet, and it turns out that salmon and fennel are really good together (note for future experiments).

Of course, we may have undone some of the good of this dinner by also baking up the rest of the gougères and eating them all. Whoops.